Movie review | G.I. Joe: Retaliation: A few good men save viewers from the evils of plot, acting

Thursday

Mar 28, 2013 at 12:01 AMMar 28, 2013 at 10:51 AM

A better-than-average, gravity-defying ninja duel leads to an epic chase with leaps, swings and zip lines through the Himalayas in G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Masked villains in red ninja suits chase Snake Eyes and Jinx as they try to spirit a ninja villain out of a mountaintop lair.

A better-than-average, gravity-defying ninja duel leads to an epic chase with leaps, swings and zip lines through the Himalayas in G.I. Joe: Retaliation.

Masked villains in red ninja suits chase Snake Eyes and Jinx as they try to spirit a ninja villain out of a mountaintop lair.

They scamper, by rope, across impossible slopes, swinging their swords.

And when a line is cut, the victim yowls into the void.

The scene might be the most dazzling bit of business of its kind from the age of digital stunts.

The rest of the movie? It’s a live-action version of a 1980s cartoon that was designed to sell toys. This is Transformers without the Bumblebee Camaro: ample action, a few one-liners and a lot of gunplay.

And it was entrusted to the director of the Justin Bieber concert documentary. How good can it be?

It has the biggest body count since Olympus Has Fallen— with stabbings, shootings and explosions — but barely a drop of blood.

It also has Dwayne Johnson, an action hero who knows his way around a raised eyebrow and a catchphrase. His character, the G.I. Joe-force sergeant known as Roadblock, quotes Jay-Z for motivational speeches. He is a father of two who tells his boss (Channing Tatum) that their little “ extraction” from Pakistan (a country described as “a riot with a ZIP code”) is so easy that they’l l be “home in time for Top Chef.”

Only they aren’t. The nemesis COBRA might have been down for the count in the first Joe movie, but it has an impostor (Jonathan Pryce, playing the real president and the fake one) in the White House and all manner of evil henchmen and ingenious gadgets (firefly-shaped bomb drones) to wipe out the G.I. Joes. And that isn’t even mentioning the ninjas.

It is up to team members Roadblock, Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki) and Flint (D.J. Cotrona) — with maybe an assist from masked marvel Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and the fetching fury Jinx (Elodie Yung) — to foil evil, the masked COBRA commander and his sidekick, Firefly (Ray Stevenson).

Maybe the Joes can enlist Bruce Willis, who needs to be reminded that John Wayne never played fifth banana in other people’s action pictures.

Acting? We’ll have none of that. Just Johnson manfully wielding an Arnold Schwarzenegger-sized heavy machine gun; masked stunt artists dodging pointy slo-mo 3-D ninja stars; and Pryce, hamming it up as both a serious, imprisoned president and a snarky villain disguised as that president.

Things go boom, bodies go down, and the one hour and 50 minutes zip by like, oh, two hours and 10. There is a “nuclear weapons are good for us” message that also seems positively ’80s.

But at least there are no jive-talking robots.

Just ninjas.

“Damn ninjas.”

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